~ From The New York Times:
Trump Pointedly Criticizes Fauci For His Testimony to Congress
by, Katie Rogers
“He wants to play all sides of the equation,” the president said of the nation’s top infectious disease expert.
"WASHINGTON — President Trump on Wednesday criticized congressional testimony delivered a day earlier by Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, who had warned against reopening the country too quickly and stressed the unknown effects the coronavirus could have on children returning to school.
“I was surprised by his answer,” Mr. Trump told reporters who had gathered in the Cabinet Room for the president’s meeting with the governors of Colorado and North Dakota. “To me it’s not an acceptable answer, especially when it comes to schools.”
The president’s desire to reopen schools and businesses in order to bring back the economy has often led to public clashes over the guidance provided by Dr. Fauci, who has warned that taking a cavalier attitude toward reopening the country could invite unnecessary suffering caused by a virus scientists are still struggling to understand. He reiterated that position on Tuesday in testimony before a Senate committee.
“He wants to play all sides of the equation,” Mr. Trump said on Wednesday, before bragging that the economy next year would be “phenomenal.”
Dr. Fauci also told the Senate panel that a vaccine for the coronavirus would almost certainly not be ready in time for the new school year, and warned of the dangers of the virus to children.
“I think we better be careful, if we are not cavalier, in thinking that children are completely immune to the deleterious effects,” Dr. Fauci said. “You’re right in the numbers that children in general do much, much better than adults and the elderly and particularly those with underlying conditions. But I am very careful, and hopefully humble in knowing that I don’t know everything about this disease. And that’s why I’m very reserved in making broad predictions.”
Dr. Fauci has increasingly become a target of critics who see him as undermining the president’s efforts to open up the country and restore the economy and as exaggerating the effects of the pandemic.
A month ago, Mr. Trump made headlines for sharing a tweet with the hashtag “#FireFauci” after a series of reports detailed the president’s slow response to the threat of the virus.
The president’s comments on Wednesday were an even more direct show of disapproval. And they came as health officials in New York were investigating more than 100 cases of a rare and dangerous inflammatory syndrome that afflicts children and appears to be connected to the virus.
“Now when you have an incident, one out of a million, one out of 500,000, will something happen? Perhaps,” Mr. Trump said, minimizing the risk to children of returning to school. “But you can be driving to school and some bad things can happen, too.”
Mr. Trump added: “This is a disease that attacks age and it attacks health and if you have a heart problem, if you have diabetes, if you’re a certain age, it’s certainly much more dangerous. But with the young children, I mean, and students, it is really just take a look at the statistics, it is pretty amazing.”
Medical experts who are beginning to learn more about how the virus affects children have said it is an oversimplification to consider them immune."
~~~~~
Here is the report from two days ago on COVID-19 and children:
~ From The New York Times:
By, Perri Klass, M.D.
There is new evidence that some children may become very sick, and we are beginning to learn more about who may be most at risk and what parents need to watch for.
"As we learn more about children and Covid-19, new research is reshaping some of our thinking. It continues to be true that children, as a group, have been relatively spared, but there is evidence that some may become very sick, and we are beginning to learn more about who may be most at risk, and what parents need to watch for.
This past week there were reports of children hospitalized in different locations, including New York City, with a multisystem inflammatory disease that has killed three children. In addition, new research continues to be published describing the ways that the virus can behave in children, which is not always how it behaves in adults.
A clinical report published Tuesday in Frontiers in Pediatrics describes five children in China who were admitted to the hospital with nonrespiratory symptoms but who turned out to have Covid, including the characteristic lung abnormalities. Dr. Wenbin Li, chief pediatrician of Tongji Hospital in Wuhan, who was the first author of the study, said in an email, “In our report, four of the five patients had fever and cough during the course of the disease; four of the five cases had digestive tract symptoms as the first manifestation.”
“The indisputable fact is that, during the outbreak of Covid-19, the pediatric emergency departments are having a huge reduction of visits,” Dr. Li wrote. Because parents are afraid of coming to the hospital, they may delay bringing sick children in, which can lead to serious complications, he said. And we’re seeing in the United States that they may also delay bringing well children in, which can lead to missed immunizations and vulnerability to other scary diseases.
“The idea that children either don’t get Covid-19 or have really mild disease is an oversimplification,” said Dr. Adam Ratner, the director of pediatric infectious diseases at New York University School of Medicine and Hassenfeld Children’s Hospital at N.Y.U. Langone Health. It’s true — and comforting — that there have been fewer cases detected in children, and that the case fatality rate is much lower in children than in adults, especially older adults, he said, but “we have had some extremely sick children.”
A study just published in the journal JAMA Pediatrics looked at 48 children in the United States who have required intensive care with Covid-19. Among other findings, 40 of them had significant medical issues, so-called comorbidities; half of these were categorized as “medically complex,” meaning they were dependent on technological support to begin with, as would be true of a child with a tracheostomy, for example. Other comorbidities included immunosuppression, usually connected to cancer treatment, obesity or diabetes.
There have also been some cases of newborns becoming sick, and at least one reported stillbirth, and a research letter published at the end of April in JAMA reported the isolation of the virus from the placenta of a woman who suffered a second-trimester miscarriage.
Dr. David Baud, the head of the obstetrics service at Lausanne University Hospital in Switzerland, who was the lead author of the letter, said that the most likely way for the virus to reach the placenta is through the bloodstream. He noted that in the outbreaks of SARS and MERS, which were also coronaviruses, infected mothers were more likely to have low birth weight babies.
And although it feels as if the current pandemic has been going on for a long time, we are in fact not far enough in yet to see what the effect on the fetus might be of infection during the first trimester of pregnancy. But Dr. Baud was one of the doctors who described the establishment of an international registry for pregnancies affected by Covid-19 in an article published this month in the Lancet.
Even when mothers test positive for Covid-19 at delivery, their infants have tended to be negative, Dr. Ratner said, as long as the mothers and babies are kept separate (or well protected by personal protective equipment) after the birth, suggesting that the virus is not being transmitted in utero or at delivery — which was also found to be the case in China.
Dr. Ratner said he had taken care of a number of children with the virus, and “most of them have very mild disease.” But some “have required intensive care and ventilatory support, so there is a wide range, even if most of the cases are OK.”
Some infants become critically ill, but in preschool and school-age children, we have been saying that Covid-19 tends to be very mild. Children with immunodeficiencies or children who have had chemotherapy are at higher risk for serious illness, but, Dr. Ratner said, “we have seen kids without prior medical problems at all who’ve needed admission, who’ve needed intensive care.” This is also the age group where the new multisystem disease is being noted, possibly sometimes as a post-infectious hyperinflammatory process.
Many of the symptoms of this recently described syndrome resemble those of a rare childhood illness called Kawasaki disease. Dr. Jane Newburger, the director of the Kawasaki program at Boston Children’s Hospital, said, “We’re seeing a wave of a syndrome that can include shock or extreme inflammation.” Shock is what happens when the body’s organs don’t get sufficient blood supply, and some of these children have poor heart function.
Kawasaki disease itself is a clinical diagnosis; there is no single lab test that can detect it, and the cause is not known. Dr. Newburger described it as “an acute illness of children that strikes generally children who were previously healthy — high fever for at least four days with red eyes, redness of lips, tongue, throat, a rash, swollen hands and feet, sometimes red palms and soles.” It’s treated with IVIG, intravenous immunoglobulin, a blood product prepared from the serum of many donors with the intent of preventing the rare but serious enlargement of the coronary arteries, which is the most dangerous complication.
Dr. Newburger said that the Covid-19-related cases are a multisystem severe inflammatory syndrome modulated by the immune system, which many people think may appear a few weeks after the initial encounter with the coronavirus. The children come in with high fevers, with dysfunction in one or more body organs, and with lab tests suggesting inflammation.
Dr. Moshe Arditi, the chief of pediatric infectious diseases and immunology at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, has been working on Kawasaki disease for over 30 years. He said that some of the cases that have been reported in different cities — especially London and New York — may just represent Kawasaki disease in children who have also been exposed to Covid-19, without being able to say whether there is any causal link, while others involve children who are much sicker, with what he described as “a toxic shock kind of syndrome,” needing intensive care — which defines this new clinical entity.
Dr. Philip Kahn, a pediatric rheumatologist at N.Y.U., said he was currently caring for several pediatric patients hospitalized with what looks like Kawasaki disease.
“In Kawasaki disease, the vast majority of children do extremely well, with no long-term bad outcomes,” Dr. Kahn said. “For the vast majority, this is an acute one-time illness of childhood.” And he has seen children with Covid-19 and this Kawasaki-like syndrome who have looked sick but done well, he said, responding to treatment with immunoglobulin. He had just gotten off the phone, he said, with a patient who had been discharged. “The kid is laughing, the mom is laughing, a week and a half later,” he said. “Treated with one dose of immunoglobulin, laughing, looks like a million bucks — that’s the kid I live for.”
And even with the cases of multisystem disease that emerged last week, “compared to adults, children are much less likely to be severely affected, and mortality is very very rare,” Dr. Newburger said. “Parents should still feel it would be very unusual for a child to be so seriously affected — but if their child suddenly becomes very febrile, seems unwell, and a parent’s sixth sense tells them their child is much sicker, seek medical attention, call the pediatrician, go to the hospital.”
“The important takeaway is that this is still a new disease for us,” Dr. Ratner said. “We are still seeing things for the first time, even though over the last few weeks we’ve seen a lot of adults and children.”
~~~~~
But not our Trump...he knows everything, been there and done that, wow...and he wants your kids to go flying back to school without an available vaccine?
And, here it is from CNN with video if you can even stand to watch the idiot:
~ From MSN/CNN:
by, Kevin Liptak & Allie Malloy
"I was surprised by his answer, actually," Trump said when asked about Dr. Anthony Fauci's warnings during televised congressional testimony that reopening states too quickly could have dire consequences.
"It's just -- to me it's not an acceptable answer, especially when it comes to schools," Trump said.
During an appearance before lawmakers on Tuesday, Fauci warned that students looking to return to campuses in the fall would likely not have a coronavirus vaccine available to them.
Fauci suggested instead that schools open cautiously, and said in some places schools should remain closed in the fall. He said if states reopen before meeting the criteria set out by the Trump administration, they risk reprisals of the outbreak.
"He wants to play all sides of the equation," Trump said of Fauci on Wednesday during a meeting with the governors of Colorado and North Dakota.
Trump has insisted in recent weeks that schools will reopen in the fall, despite schools and universities saying otherwise.
"We're opening our country. People want it open. The schools are going to be open," Trump said Wednesday in the Cabinet Room.
Trump's relationship with Fauci has been closely scrutinized during the coronavirus outbreak because he sometimes appears to contradict or correct the President during public appearances.
Fauci said during his testimony that his relationship with Trump is not contentious, but the President has bristled at instances when he appears at odds with the leading infectious diseases expert.
Last month, Trump retweeted a message calling for Fauci's firing, but said later he wasn't looking to dismiss him.
Still, many of Trump's allies have taken to publicly criticizing Fauci, casting him as an unelected bureaucrat with undue influence on how and when the nation will return to normal.
Fauci sought to dispel that notion during his appearance on Tuesday, saying he only offers the President public health advice and doesn't weigh in on the economy.
While the President has griped in private about some of Fauci's public comments -- including his caution about an untested treatment for coronavirus -- his complaints were largely kept out of public view until Wednesday.
But even his comments during the meeting with governors stopped short of outright anger. Instead, Trump said he believed colleges should be aggressive in reopening because young people haven't displayed the serious symptoms of the disease at the same rates as older people.
"These are young students. They're in great shape," he said, going on to suggest the benefits outweigh the risks for higher education institutions.
"Will something happen? Perhaps," Trump said. "You can be driving to school and some bad things can happen too."
~~~~~
I'm not sure why I printed both reports of Trump's statements, I guess I am dumbfounded and cannot believe the words that come out of this clown's mouth. Meanwhile, Paris wants to go to bed, it's late and tomorrow - actually today we'll have a great treat with Dr. Rick Bright testifying before the Senate.
Here's a Masterpiece of Understatement.....
There must be some kind of way outta here
Said the joker to the thief
There's too much confusion
I can't get no relief
Said the joker to the thief
There's too much confusion
I can't get no relief
Business men, they drink my wine
Plowman dig my earth
None were level on the mind
Nobody up at his word
Plowman dig my earth
None were level on the mind
Nobody up at his word
Hey, hey
No reason to get excited
The thief he kindly spoke
There are many here among us
Who feel that life is but a joke
But, uh, but you and I, we've been through that
And this is not our fate
So let us stop talkin' falsely now
The hour's getting late, hey
The thief he kindly spoke
There are many here among us
Who feel that life is but a joke
But, uh, but you and I, we've been through that
And this is not our fate
So let us stop talkin' falsely now
The hour's getting late, hey
All along the watchtower
Princes kept the view
While all the women came and went
Barefoot servants, too
Outside in the cold distance
A wildcat did growl
Two riders were approaching
And the wind began to howl
Princes kept the view
While all the women came and went
Barefoot servants, too
Outside in the cold distance
A wildcat did growl
Two riders were approaching
And the wind began to howl
Songwriter: Bob Dylan